I just got around to reading this. I had no idea that once people were released, they are confined to home until their trial. How are they to earn a living, or just live period? This is all so inhumane.
I am reading your report of this dear girl and her father, over again, as I just saw a video of Kristi Noem & the Governor of Louisiana touring “New Detention Facility” in Angola, Louisiana. Just disgusting what’s become of the U.S.A. No wonder the country’s population is actually FALLING. And, as best as Canada’s government is allowed to know, there are “about 44” actual Canadians, in ICE detention, …no doubt all preferring to just go home. One young woman, grabbed in an airport in California, spent nearly 2 weeks in 3 ! different ‘facilities’, transported between them in chains, because she’d made some error in her work-permit paperwork & had gone to the wrong place to correct it, so “was illegally in the Country”.
Noem and her sidekick are overheard, looking at some 8 x 7 concrete & iron-bar cell, and quipping that they “have bedsheets and all that”. Wish you could lock her into one!
—And, what is with K.Noem anyway? Dressed in tight jeans, her toothpick-thin legs, and no butt or chest? Plus, the expensive Texas-special cosmetic-dentistry, & Mar-a-Lago Face. The woman has an adult son, I think. She must be abusing new weight-loss drugs, or else she has Anorexia-nervosa. Though, she should be “nervosa”, doing DJT’s dirty work. (Pam Bondi’s face is collapsing into wrinkles fit for a 69-y.o., too… which is looking sort of strange with the bleach-blond do.)
Like, for example, stick-skinny Kristi Noem, and her unqualified side-kick, touring the new facility in Angola, Louisiana, with the Governor…. Looking at these bare tiny concrete/ iron-bar cells, and quipping that “they even have bedsheets and all that”, then laughing at something. Like that?? Disgusting.
A long video, a You-Tube video out about their tour, attributed to Forbes.
Thanks for this article. I had wondered what happened to this young woman after her story was no longer in the news. Sadly it seems like she continues to deal with severe restrictions and it seems like her court date could put her in detention again like so many others who are just living their lives and going to work and school every day.
The majority of American citizens do agree that undocumented people with criminal records should be removed from the USA. But they do not agree that upstanding, hard-working undocumented people should be abused and deported without a legal hearing. This kind of dictator-like action is not what the majority of Americans want.
Was the implication that the medicine her pregnant friend was given in detention caused the miscarriage? That is on point for eugenics agenda of the White Christian Nationalists, but don’t want to read into it too much.
I'd also add: even if this was criminal detention, no one deserves treatment like what she describes. Being shackled for days on end, no privacy even for the toilet. I'd say that's extreme, but it seems depressingly normal.
I look at that smiling, beautiful woman in a flowery dress . . . and then the image of an ICE detention center and I cannot help but think of what even a few weeks in there must have done to her psyche, her soul.
I've been to jail. Not proud of it but it is what it is. It was for a DUI and I could not stop drinking despite being court ordered (which is standard pre-sentencing practice in my locale). I should have been in treatment, not behind bars . . . but I couldn't point fingers, really (and I did commit a crime). Anyway, my life has taken a positive 180 since then . . . but let me tell you, jail is a dehumanizing place. "Prison"--where people spend a minimum of a year for felonies--is a slightly different experience (so I'm told). It can actually be a more rehabilitating experience. But a detention facility--which is what a country jail is, too--has virtually no rehabilitative or redemptive qualities. *It is not supposed to.* Perhaps in Sweden their jails and not just their prisons have a humane, redemptive aspect to them . . . but in America, since at least the 1970s, jail is deliberately made to be awful. Nothing is being "corrected" in these "correctional facilities."
And I was among non-violent offenders, about 2/3 of whom had addiction or non-psychotic mental health issues. We got meds and limited access to a psych & counselors. Other parts of the jail crammed 10 guys into cells meant for 4 . . . w/ literally no opportunity to leave except for church, medical appointments, and brief legal visits.
Anyway, sorry this became about me but the point is that my experience was in many ways more traumatic than my deployment to Afghanistan (and obviously the two are related). **But** I knew I had a) actually committed a crime and b) I had an addiction issue that was going to either keep sending me back to jail . . . or the grave. And the experience was still awful.
BUT THIS 19 Y/O GIRL . . . even a week or two in a place run by ICE thugs is going to haunt her for life. In my experience, my guards were at worst petty pricks who tried to screw w/ you in little ways. Many others, actually, were quite decent & down-to-earth. That's not ICE's current recruiting pool. Unfortunately, because of the ICE/DHS mindset . . . I fear deeply that their detention facilities are going to increasingly mirror the worst days at Gitmo or Abu Ghraib. Without even talking about those who actually put their hands on people, otherwise decent & patriotic troops became able to dehumanize the detainees because they were "the enemy." And they *were,* for the most part . . . let's not kid ourselves. Doesn't justify torture, but there *were* dedicated AQ, ISIS, Taliban killers in those detention centers. We were in an actual war.
**But nineteen y/o Arias Cristobal is not the fucking enemy.** She is not part of any entity with which we are at war. If you *really* want her out of the country, give her a court date for a hearing that--these days--will likely decide against her. And voila--she's gone. Her detention was unbelievably unnecessary.
But it was *deliberate.* The humiliation and intimidation were deliberate. I've read that there are sanitation issues at the ICE facilities. I'm sure. They've ruined this girl's life at present and perhaps her future. Deliberately. It's sick.
Adrian, Thank you for bringing Ximena's terrible, yet inspiring, story to us. We should be happy to have such individuals in our country. Instead, we still have too many people who believe the color of one's skin or the language they speak is something to be denigrated. These are the same people who proclaim their belief in God with great fanfare. Which God are they talking about, the golden calf? Unfortunately, the real enemies to the country are sitting around a table in a cabinet meeting professing their faith to their God, Donald Trump. Idol worshippers all.
And, to fulfill what seems to be Stephen Miller’s agenda… There are not the Big Numbers of very-pale-skinned humans, of working-age, in the Whole World, who would even WANT to immigrate to the USA, to replace all the people they are trying to eject!! You are, very soon, going to end up with the people born in 1955-1960-1963, peak baby-boom, a lot of whom didn’t themselves have children or hardly-any, becoming very elderly /frail people, and you’re not going to have enough working-age people to take care of them!!
(I’m a baby-boomer, and thank heavens I’m Canadian: My Mom is 93 with advanced Dementia and advanced Arthritis… It takes 2 or 3 of our wonderful Nursing-Home Aides —so many of them, Filipino or Caribbean or African immigrants —AND one of their mechanical lift-devices, to move her into a bath, or from bed to wheelchair.)
Great piece Adrian. I feel like there’s something missing from Warnock’s criticism of the administration. He says we will hold them accountable. For what? It appears that there is no law against taking a 19 yr old and throwing her in a dungeon because her parents brought her here when she was four instead of prior to birth. That’s the problem. The system is broken. Republicans broke it and democrats are too chicken shit to even articulate a plan for how to fix it. Their most recent attempt was to do whatever the republicans wanted and that failed too.
Drives me crazy that everybody has to caveat every statement with "they said they were going to go after criminals, which we support". I understand why, but if that was their intention they would not be wearing masks. It was never a good faith intention. They knew it would work politically and put the left in this exact trap.
Thanks for the great reporting on this unimaginable experience!
Of course. Uugh. As I see it, yes the collection "Left" bungled the border but all of MAGA's talk about "securing" the border was a ruse or red herring from the get-go. We were in a unique situation--the border was virtually sealed off for ~2 years during COVID. Both Trump & Biden had certain emergency powers to halt immigration & border traffic . . . which made perfect sense amidst a once-in-a-century pandemic.
But then the pandemic ended. And with it, the logic for most of the Presidency's emergency health powers. You know . . . the restrictions the MAGAts were whining about the whole time. So Biden eventually declares that COVID ceases to a true pandemic-level emergency . . . and with that so goes his magic wand to close the border.
And yet these hypocritical MFers basically demanded that he do just that--that he inappropriately utilize an expired emergency power . . . when the "emergency" was officially over.
You want to effectively end immigration (at least from certain parts of the world) and turn the SW border into the Berlin Wall? Pass a fucking law!
I don't claim to have, retrospectively, a silver bullet of a playbook that the Dems should have used in 2023-24 on the border. In my humble opinion, they deserved to lose **some** credibility on the issue . . . or at least it was to be expected, let me put it that way. The Squad types got all the attention and they created a massive image problem. Okay . . . great. You had the White House. You had Congress at one point. Your leaders were Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer . . . hardly a bunch of wooly student radicals. Does no one know how to message in the Democratic party of today?
They probably should have jumped on that Langford border bill sooner . . . and perhaps have made clear that--yes, while a "grand bargain" type of solution would eventually be necessary on illegal immigration--they could tackle the immigration & border issue independently of the pathway to citizenship issue.
Yes, that would have been enraging to the Left wing . . . but that's where *leadership* comes into play.
Well said. On the other hand I don’t think it’s toxic to make a proactive argument for immigration. Without the surge in immigration we had in 23-24, we probably would have seen much more inflationary pressure on wages, the lack of which really allowed the soft landing we all enjoyed until Trump decided to fuck it up. Without significant immigration our country will slip into a demographic shit hole where we will follow the Germans and Japanese into economic stagnation. Immigration is a huge net positive from an economic as well as a cultural perspective. We have food trucks now! That wasn’t a thing 15 years ago.
I couldn't agree more than immigration is a huge net positive. My posts are too long as it is, so I wanted to just address the problems of messaging . . . combined with--and made worse by--the gross dishonest & bad faith in the GOP's "secure the border" narrative.
I mean . . . not sure when you went to school or what they teach in elementary school today, but as a child of the 80s . . . we generally thought of "a nation of immigrants" as being as American an ideal as Mom and apple pie. My neck of the woods was also rather diverse, w/ a lot of first & second generation immigration from India, East Asia, and the Middle East so I suppose we were more inclined to see it as a positive than perhaps other parts of the country. But still . . .
Unless Gen Z is prepared to have babies like they're going out of style, we need immigration to avoid stagnation, just as you said. There's never going to be immigration to Japan, it's virtually homogeneous. *They* are going to have significantly up their birth rate, most likely. We don't necessarily have to . . . if we allow for immigration. This is used to be both common sense . . . AND a source of pride.
Of all the hideaous things I've read about what ICE is doing, this one makes my blood boil. This craziness has to stop. I can't imagine how anyone could condone this!
I just got around to reading this. I had no idea that once people were released, they are confined to home until their trial. How are they to earn a living, or just live period? This is all so inhumane.
I am reading your report of this dear girl and her father, over again, as I just saw a video of Kristi Noem & the Governor of Louisiana touring “New Detention Facility” in Angola, Louisiana. Just disgusting what’s become of the U.S.A. No wonder the country’s population is actually FALLING. And, as best as Canada’s government is allowed to know, there are “about 44” actual Canadians, in ICE detention, …no doubt all preferring to just go home. One young woman, grabbed in an airport in California, spent nearly 2 weeks in 3 ! different ‘facilities’, transported between them in chains, because she’d made some error in her work-permit paperwork & had gone to the wrong place to correct it, so “was illegally in the Country”.
Noem and her sidekick are overheard, looking at some 8 x 7 concrete & iron-bar cell, and quipping that they “have bedsheets and all that”. Wish you could lock her into one!
—And, what is with K.Noem anyway? Dressed in tight jeans, her toothpick-thin legs, and no butt or chest? Plus, the expensive Texas-special cosmetic-dentistry, & Mar-a-Lago Face. The woman has an adult son, I think. She must be abusing new weight-loss drugs, or else she has Anorexia-nervosa. Though, she should be “nervosa”, doing DJT’s dirty work. (Pam Bondi’s face is collapsing into wrinkles fit for a 69-y.o., too… which is looking sort of strange with the bleach-blond do.)
What about spitting you out into Vladimir Putin's hands :
https://www.youtube.com/post/Ugkx3PMshdDZiez_K5j84Tw-h83tU8J6-I-6
The bottom is truly bottomless...
I will never forgive the percentage of the American population who thinks this cruelty to fellow human beings is ok and laugh about it.
Like, for example, stick-skinny Kristi Noem, and her unqualified side-kick, touring the new facility in Angola, Louisiana, with the Governor…. Looking at these bare tiny concrete/ iron-bar cells, and quipping that “they even have bedsheets and all that”, then laughing at something. Like that?? Disgusting.
A long video, a You-Tube video out about their tour, attributed to Forbes.
Thanks for this article. I had wondered what happened to this young woman after her story was no longer in the news. Sadly it seems like she continues to deal with severe restrictions and it seems like her court date could put her in detention again like so many others who are just living their lives and going to work and school every day.
The majority of American citizens do agree that undocumented people with criminal records should be removed from the USA. But they do not agree that upstanding, hard-working undocumented people should be abused and deported without a legal hearing. This kind of dictator-like action is not what the majority of Americans want.
Was the implication that the medicine her pregnant friend was given in detention caused the miscarriage? That is on point for eugenics agenda of the White Christian Nationalists, but don’t want to read into it too much.
I truly hate what we did to her but am so glad to see her persevering through it all. Thanks for bringing us her story.
I'd also add: even if this was criminal detention, no one deserves treatment like what she describes. Being shackled for days on end, no privacy even for the toilet. I'd say that's extreme, but it seems depressingly normal.
What was the "medicine" given to the pregnant woman?
Exactly the question I had.
I look at that smiling, beautiful woman in a flowery dress . . . and then the image of an ICE detention center and I cannot help but think of what even a few weeks in there must have done to her psyche, her soul.
I've been to jail. Not proud of it but it is what it is. It was for a DUI and I could not stop drinking despite being court ordered (which is standard pre-sentencing practice in my locale). I should have been in treatment, not behind bars . . . but I couldn't point fingers, really (and I did commit a crime). Anyway, my life has taken a positive 180 since then . . . but let me tell you, jail is a dehumanizing place. "Prison"--where people spend a minimum of a year for felonies--is a slightly different experience (so I'm told). It can actually be a more rehabilitating experience. But a detention facility--which is what a country jail is, too--has virtually no rehabilitative or redemptive qualities. *It is not supposed to.* Perhaps in Sweden their jails and not just their prisons have a humane, redemptive aspect to them . . . but in America, since at least the 1970s, jail is deliberately made to be awful. Nothing is being "corrected" in these "correctional facilities."
And I was among non-violent offenders, about 2/3 of whom had addiction or non-psychotic mental health issues. We got meds and limited access to a psych & counselors. Other parts of the jail crammed 10 guys into cells meant for 4 . . . w/ literally no opportunity to leave except for church, medical appointments, and brief legal visits.
Anyway, sorry this became about me but the point is that my experience was in many ways more traumatic than my deployment to Afghanistan (and obviously the two are related). **But** I knew I had a) actually committed a crime and b) I had an addiction issue that was going to either keep sending me back to jail . . . or the grave. And the experience was still awful.
BUT THIS 19 Y/O GIRL . . . even a week or two in a place run by ICE thugs is going to haunt her for life. In my experience, my guards were at worst petty pricks who tried to screw w/ you in little ways. Many others, actually, were quite decent & down-to-earth. That's not ICE's current recruiting pool. Unfortunately, because of the ICE/DHS mindset . . . I fear deeply that their detention facilities are going to increasingly mirror the worst days at Gitmo or Abu Ghraib. Without even talking about those who actually put their hands on people, otherwise decent & patriotic troops became able to dehumanize the detainees because they were "the enemy." And they *were,* for the most part . . . let's not kid ourselves. Doesn't justify torture, but there *were* dedicated AQ, ISIS, Taliban killers in those detention centers. We were in an actual war.
**But nineteen y/o Arias Cristobal is not the fucking enemy.** She is not part of any entity with which we are at war. If you *really* want her out of the country, give her a court date for a hearing that--these days--will likely decide against her. And voila--she's gone. Her detention was unbelievably unnecessary.
But it was *deliberate.* The humiliation and intimidation were deliberate. I've read that there are sanitation issues at the ICE facilities. I'm sure. They've ruined this girl's life at present and perhaps her future. Deliberately. It's sick.
So glad to hear you shook the addiction!
Adrian, Thank you for bringing Ximena's terrible, yet inspiring, story to us. We should be happy to have such individuals in our country. Instead, we still have too many people who believe the color of one's skin or the language they speak is something to be denigrated. These are the same people who proclaim their belief in God with great fanfare. Which God are they talking about, the golden calf? Unfortunately, the real enemies to the country are sitting around a table in a cabinet meeting professing their faith to their God, Donald Trump. Idol worshippers all.
And, to fulfill what seems to be Stephen Miller’s agenda… There are not the Big Numbers of very-pale-skinned humans, of working-age, in the Whole World, who would even WANT to immigrate to the USA, to replace all the people they are trying to eject!! You are, very soon, going to end up with the people born in 1955-1960-1963, peak baby-boom, a lot of whom didn’t themselves have children or hardly-any, becoming very elderly /frail people, and you’re not going to have enough working-age people to take care of them!!
(I’m a baby-boomer, and thank heavens I’m Canadian: My Mom is 93 with advanced Dementia and advanced Arthritis… It takes 2 or 3 of our wonderful Nursing-Home Aides —so many of them, Filipino or Caribbean or African immigrants —AND one of their mechanical lift-devices, to move her into a bath, or from bed to wheelchair.)
Thank you for telling us Ximena’s powerful story.
Great piece Adrian. I feel like there’s something missing from Warnock’s criticism of the administration. He says we will hold them accountable. For what? It appears that there is no law against taking a 19 yr old and throwing her in a dungeon because her parents brought her here when she was four instead of prior to birth. That’s the problem. The system is broken. Republicans broke it and democrats are too chicken shit to even articulate a plan for how to fix it. Their most recent attempt was to do whatever the republicans wanted and that failed too.
Thank you. I wonder about these people every day. The trauma they will have to go through is inhuman to inflict on them.
We all need to stand up for them.
Drives me crazy that everybody has to caveat every statement with "they said they were going to go after criminals, which we support". I understand why, but if that was their intention they would not be wearing masks. It was never a good faith intention. They knew it would work politically and put the left in this exact trap.
Thanks for the great reporting on this unimaginable experience!
Don’t forget “I support a strong border…”
Of course. Uugh. As I see it, yes the collection "Left" bungled the border but all of MAGA's talk about "securing" the border was a ruse or red herring from the get-go. We were in a unique situation--the border was virtually sealed off for ~2 years during COVID. Both Trump & Biden had certain emergency powers to halt immigration & border traffic . . . which made perfect sense amidst a once-in-a-century pandemic.
But then the pandemic ended. And with it, the logic for most of the Presidency's emergency health powers. You know . . . the restrictions the MAGAts were whining about the whole time. So Biden eventually declares that COVID ceases to a true pandemic-level emergency . . . and with that so goes his magic wand to close the border.
And yet these hypocritical MFers basically demanded that he do just that--that he inappropriately utilize an expired emergency power . . . when the "emergency" was officially over.
You want to effectively end immigration (at least from certain parts of the world) and turn the SW border into the Berlin Wall? Pass a fucking law!
I don't claim to have, retrospectively, a silver bullet of a playbook that the Dems should have used in 2023-24 on the border. In my humble opinion, they deserved to lose **some** credibility on the issue . . . or at least it was to be expected, let me put it that way. The Squad types got all the attention and they created a massive image problem. Okay . . . great. You had the White House. You had Congress at one point. Your leaders were Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer . . . hardly a bunch of wooly student radicals. Does no one know how to message in the Democratic party of today?
They probably should have jumped on that Langford border bill sooner . . . and perhaps have made clear that--yes, while a "grand bargain" type of solution would eventually be necessary on illegal immigration--they could tackle the immigration & border issue independently of the pathway to citizenship issue.
Yes, that would have been enraging to the Left wing . . . but that's where *leadership* comes into play.
Well said. On the other hand I don’t think it’s toxic to make a proactive argument for immigration. Without the surge in immigration we had in 23-24, we probably would have seen much more inflationary pressure on wages, the lack of which really allowed the soft landing we all enjoyed until Trump decided to fuck it up. Without significant immigration our country will slip into a demographic shit hole where we will follow the Germans and Japanese into economic stagnation. Immigration is a huge net positive from an economic as well as a cultural perspective. We have food trucks now! That wasn’t a thing 15 years ago.
I couldn't agree more than immigration is a huge net positive. My posts are too long as it is, so I wanted to just address the problems of messaging . . . combined with--and made worse by--the gross dishonest & bad faith in the GOP's "secure the border" narrative.
I mean . . . not sure when you went to school or what they teach in elementary school today, but as a child of the 80s . . . we generally thought of "a nation of immigrants" as being as American an ideal as Mom and apple pie. My neck of the woods was also rather diverse, w/ a lot of first & second generation immigration from India, East Asia, and the Middle East so I suppose we were more inclined to see it as a positive than perhaps other parts of the country. But still . . .
Unless Gen Z is prepared to have babies like they're going out of style, we need immigration to avoid stagnation, just as you said. There's never going to be immigration to Japan, it's virtually homogeneous. *They* are going to have significantly up their birth rate, most likely. We don't necessarily have to . . . if we allow for immigration. This is used to be both common sense . . . AND a source of pride.
Of all the hideaous things I've read about what ICE is doing, this one makes my blood boil. This craziness has to stop. I can't imagine how anyone could condone this!